Resource Accounting in the new z/OS World

Fabio Massimo Ottaviani
June 2005

Most of the resource accounting applications in mainframe data centers have been developed more than 10 years ago. At those ancient times the mission critical workloads were made of traditional IMS and CICS transactions and human TSO users, memory was a precious resource, tapes were solid, real cartridges and there was only one processor type for any kind of application.

In 2005 the z/OS world is dominated by new different workloads: millions of DDF requests crowd every day at the DB2xDIST gates, while dozens of Websphere servants grab system resources to answer to esoteric Java based queries.

This scenario will become even more complicated because of a new hardware technology knocking at the z/OS door: a new processor type called zSeries Application Assist Processor (zAAP). These processors work together with the standard general purpose processors but they can be used only by Java code; they are much less expensive than the other ones and, more important, their usage don’t influence the z/OS software license costs. So it’s extremely important to separate standard processors and zAAP consumptions and to charge the right cost to the users.

In this paper these new software and hardware components will be analyzed from the Resource Accounting point of view, giving indications about what to do to adequate the existing applications to the new z/OS world.